8. Remembering names and faces

you're listening to memory booster, aHimalaya learning audio course. Be sure to check out all of the other exclusivecourses in the Himalaya app or on himalaya.com.

[00:00:24] Hi, I'm ed Allard and this ismemory booster. In this show, you'll hear from memory experts at leadinguniversities, from Harvard to Columbia and many more. I'll talk to them aboutdifferent kinds of memory, along with some other fascinating topics. I'mcurious about at the end of every episode, we'll review a trick technique orexercise you can use to make your memory work for you.

[00:00:49] The pilots you seem somewhatfamiliar that threatened you before. I like a point of avoiding for many artsywith pirates. Ah, it's been a one time captain.

[00:01:02] Yes, sir. You mentioned battle

[00:01:09] unless the bond James Bond havewe met before? Oh, I think I'd remember.

[00:01:19] Recognizing faces andremembering people's names are an essential part of life. If you want tosuccessfully network, make a lot of friends or be a hit at parties. The firststep is usually recognizing people in the first place. I'll be honest. I'm notgreat at any of it, but a lot of you have probably experienced that momentwhere you recognize someone, but can't quite bring their name to mind.

[00:01:40] I've also heard of people withconditions on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Super-Recognizers who rememberevery face they see and people with so-called face blindness are these termsreal? What do they actually mean? We'll tackle these questions about facialrecognition. And we'll learn from an old friend, how we can get those names tostick in our brain a little better.

[00:02:03] Before that I turned to anexpert to learn more about the science behind how we recognize people. My nameis Isabel . I'm a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt university. I'minterested in object recognition and face recognition. Um, specifically howpeople learn these skills, how they get really good at them, uh, with parts ofthe brain are involved in these skills.

[00:02:28] And in general, we're interestedin my lab. Um, And individual differences, meaning, you know, how w Y well,whether some people are much better at these skills than others, and whether wecan explain why that is. My instinct seven telling me over the course ofworking on this project that recognizing faces must be this distinct skill thatinvolves different parts of the brain that basically any other function.

[00:02:55] Cause it seems so special, butis that really the case? Um, well that's, that's a great question. This isactually how I got started. This was the topic of my dissertation, you know,some 20 years ago. So, you know, face recognition is definitely special in thesense that if you measure how people do it, if you look at the brain whilepeople do it, you can find many differences between, you know, face recognitionand how we recognize most other objects.

[00:03:29] And so it's a very prevalenttheory. That face recognition is very special, very unique. And in fact that,um, it relies on kind of innate skills that we have evolved to do it and a partof the brain that's that, you know, we're born with just to do that, thatparticular function. Now I've been interested in kind of challenging thoseideas and.

[00:03:55] The way that I, that myself andmy colleagues have been doing this is that we consider face recognition to be acase of expertise. So the idea is that sure face recognition is special, but itis special because it is specialized because we have. A lot of experiencerecognizing faces and, and recognizing faces requires, um, kind of a unique,it, it presents a unique problem in that, you know, every phase has the samekinds of parts.

[00:04:28] So it's difficult to identify acertain person just because, you know, Oh, well, This is my friend Bob, becausehe has a nose, right. Or because the eyes are above the nose, he don't do that.Right. You have to encode so much specific information in order to recognize aperson. And that's the, that's a similar problem that you will find for othercategories.

[00:04:51] Let's say, if you get reallygood at recognizing car models, or if you are interested in birds, right. Tobecome a birdwatcher and you can identify first species really well. Um, if youknow, the similarity of these objects is similar to what you do with faces. Andwhat we found is that. Once you study people who have expertise with theseother categories, you see that they recognize them in a way that's similar tofaces and that the same parts of the brain are involved.

[00:05:24] And that's important tounderstand face recognition because it tells us how face recognition becomesspecialized. If you're a car pro or a bird lover or an expert at identifyingany other thing, you actually use the same parts of the brain as when you'retrying to recognize someone's face. So it turns out that picking out facesisn't as unique of an ability as we thought what's more specifically.

[00:05:51] Does it tell us about how facialrecognition becomes special? Well, it gives us clues as to what changes when webecome an expert with faces or something else. So one of the big buzz words andface recognition is holistic processing. Meaning that when we recognize. Faces,uh, we tend to pay attention to all of the parts at once to the whole of theface.

[00:06:17] Right? So it's very difficult.If you ask someone, imagine that you are going to, you know, take pictures andthe magazine photographs in the ma in magazines, and you cut the differentpieces of different faces and you put them together right. To make, um, A newphase that has the eyes of one person and the nose of someone else and themess.

[00:06:36] So you make this, this strangeface. Um, that's not really a real person. And then you ask someone, okay. Socan you recognize the eyes in this phase? And they might be, let's say the eyesof a famous actress that they know. People are very, very bad at doing this.They might fail to recognize the eyes of their best friend or their sister whenthey're put together in the context of other face parts.

[00:07:01] And that's because people arenot good at ignoring the other parts of the face. So we studied this process ofholistic processing with other categories. Because we can see how novices doit, how people who don't have a whole lot of experience of birds or cars, orsometimes we use novel objects that we create in the lab and we train people tobecome experts with them.

[00:07:26] And so we can see where doesholistic processing comes from, um, and, and how it changes with, withpractice. If we can practice our skills that identifying things like birds orcars, why are some people myself included so bad at recognizing faces? I'm 24years old and I've met a lot of people. It seems like that should be more thanenough practice.

[00:07:50] So people have studied kind ofthe development or the time course over somebody's life span of, of facerecognition abilities. And it's a, it's a surprising skill. It's quitedifferent from other ones. And that it changes a lot early in development. So,you know, when it's been studied, maybe with kids starting or that, you know,six, seven, and it, it increases and gets better and better, very fast.

[00:08:16] And tends to peak around. Ithink it's around 30 years of age. This is not work that I've done. So I mighthave the exact age wrong, but it's just, it's much later than, than otherskills. And so that, you know, you might still get a little better with it.Now, another interesting point is that people vary a lot.

[00:08:37] In face recognition a lot morethan we first thought that they did. So, you know, it's like something likedyslexia right, is, um, studied a lot and, and quite prevalent. And the, um,incidents of people who really have strong problems in face recognition, uh, asyou know, has been estimated to be about as high as, as problems with reading.

[00:09:03] And even if you don't have.Serious problems with face recognition. Uh, your, your abilities are going tovary a lot from one person to the next. And what's interesting is that peopleare very bad at estimating how good they are at face recognition. So oftenwe'll have someone tell us, Oh, I'm so bad at faces.

[00:09:22] You should study me. And when weput them through simple to us, that measure face recognition, ability. They'repretty normal, you know, by definition, most people are going to be average.Uh, and what you realize is that what people are saying is that they oftenforget other people's names and recognize remembering somebody's name is not aface recognition properly.

[00:09:47] You know, it's an ability toassociate. Kind of like an arbitrary label with a face. But if you know theperson, right, if you see a phase of an actor or a friend or someone in thestreet and you, you know, that you know them, you know where you've seen them,you know what their job is, then recognize them.

[00:10:09] You've reg your face recognitionis working that you don't remember it. Their name is something different. Sothose skills are separate. There's a difference between remembering someone'sname and just recognizing them think about it. People usually complain thatthey think they recognize someone's face, but can't quite place.

[00:10:26] Their name names are a lot morearbitrary. We'll get into how we can make the name face connection a bit later.The first step is always going to be remembering that, you know, the person orrecognizing their face. So why do people seem to have different levels ofaptitude for that skill? Is it genetic or social?

[00:10:46] This has been studied quite abit, um, in different ways, there is a very large genetic, um, or hereticalcomponent to face recognition. So this has been studied through twin studiesand identical twins are much more similar than non-identical twins and theirface recognition ability. Uh, it's actually the same for the sameinvestigators, studied car recognition and found the same level of, you know,high heritability heritability.

[00:11:19] So the level of, of, uh, thecontribution from, you know, genes appears to be about as high as we find forgeneral intelligence. So it's very high now. It's not entirely determined bygenes. It's about as, as researchers, we would say it's about. 50% of thevariance. So about 50% of the differences between people is explained by aheritable component and the rest is going to be other things like experience.

[00:11:54] So something that, for example,we and others have studied is the influence of living, um, in a very smalltown. So we compare the face recognition abilities. Uh, people from a smallhometown versus people from, and the larger hometown and the consistentlypeople from a small hometown, uh, do more poorly.

[00:12:18] Which, you know, this is acorrelation, so you have to be careful in interpreting it, but it is consistentwith the possibility that I'm living in an area where you don't have toconstantly meet new people. Right? So every time in a small hometown, everytime you go to a restaurant, it's probably a restaurant, you know, with facesyou've seen before.

[00:12:40] So you don't have to do thiswork that you do in a big city where you have to remember. You know your waiterbecause, you know, there's, there's five waiters in the restaurant, then you'venever seen this one or the other ones. Right? So you're paying attention tothis. Um, that's something that, that you constantly do in an environment wherethere's lots of strangers and that you don't have to do in a small hometown.

[00:13:04] And this seems to impact yourability to recognize faces. So to sum up, there's an influence from genes andthere's an influence from the environment. Isabella. And I talked a bit moreabout the science behind what's going on and people with different levels ofskill at recognizing people. I can tell you about research that we've donelooking at the brains of normal people who vary in their face recognitionskill.

[00:13:30] And we know that there's a partof the brain called the shoes, a form face area that's really active duringface recognition, more than during object recognition. And in a recent study,we looked at the. Thickness of the cortex in that part of the brain, uh, andhow it differed across individuals. And what we found was a very strongcorrelation between the thickness of the fusiform cortex and the she's a foreignface area and face recognition, the ability.

[00:14:00] So people who are better at facerecognition had a thinner, um, cortex in this area. And what's. Veryinteresting is that we can also measure, we can also relay the thickness of thecortex to other object recognition skills like car recognition. And in thatcase, the relationship is opposite. So the people who are best at recognizingcars have a thicker cortex in the fusiform face area.

[00:14:29] So it's a strong relationshipand it's completely opposite for faces and objects. And so that's somethingthat we've been studying in. Follow up work, but one possibility. We think thatexplains the surprising result is that face recognition occurs. It starts veryearly in life. Um, and the pressure's on brain development.

[00:14:52] Are quite different than whathappens in an adult brain. So in a young brain, you have a lot of connectionsand you're going to get a lot of pruning over time. So you're going to lose alot of these connections and this pruning is very important in braindevelopment. And it's maybe that the people who.

[00:15:12] Experienced the most pruning,meaning that the best connections between areas are getting selected are theones that end up being best at face recognition as adults. But in contrast, ifyou aren't very interested in recognizing car models, that's probably notsomething that you started to do when you were five.

[00:15:32] Um, and so by the time you startpicking up skills like this, your brain is, is kind of, has settled in, in amore effective. The state and the changes in your brain that are occurring, um,are different with practice. And this may lead to, you know, new connectionsand a thicker cortex as you pick up new skills.

[00:15:51] So a similar skill is similar,um, outcome in the end, but, uh, structural changes in the brain are verydifferent than it's maybe because of when it occurs in development.

[00:16:08] No, the basic ins and outs ofrecognizing faces along with the related skills, like recognizing cars, it'stime to take it to the extremes. I asked Isabel about the termSuper-Recognizers I'd heard through the internet grapevine. You know, it'ssuper recognizers is a term that is kind of a buzzword. It reallySuper-Recognizers just means that you're at the very top of the normal curve.

[00:16:34] Right? So for any ability,anything that people we'll do that you can measure on a test, if you have agood enough test that sensitive, right? You are going to get a normal curvewhere most people are going to be. The vast majority of people are going to bein the middle. And some people are going to be, you know, much worse at thetail end at the low end.

[00:16:56] And some people are going to bemuch better, better at it at the high end. Now, you know, you can label thosepeople and that's often, that's just the definition of a lot of disorders,right. So, you know, it's, it's true in all of psychology, right? So everybodygets anxious, but if you. Are at the very high end and you have a very highlevel of anxiety, then you might have an anxiety disorder, right.

[00:17:20] But the quality of what you haveis of the same kind that other people experience is just extreme. So it's kindof the same thing with, with, uh, perception here is that you can measure adisability and then you're going to have a few people who do really, reallywell consistently. And you're going to label them as.

[00:17:39] Super. Is that like an actualterm or definition of scientific value? Um, it's a, it's a label that wascreated by some scientists, you know, to, to, to, um, you know, as, as kind ofsomething fun to illustrate what they were interested in. There's nodemonstration as of yet that there's something. In a qualitatively, differentgoing on there.

[00:18:06] And it's unlikely to be thecase. I mean, you can still, as I said, it's it's general practice inpsychology to be interested in the extremes and the people at the bottom or atthe high end, for various reasons. And sometimes there are. Yeah. Theorieswhere you say, okay, well maybe there's something really special.

[00:18:25] That's going on, you know, aspecial part of the brain that's kicking in or a special skill that people havedeveloped, but it's not really the case here for, or as of yet for firstSuper-Recognizers with faces. So these supposedly super recognizers just havethe right combination of genetic and environmental factors, but there doesn'tseem to be a concrete definition.

[00:18:50] What about the other end of thecurve face blindness. Isabelle told me that in some cases that's actually amore solid condition. Yeah. Face blindness, not really a scientific term. Thescientific term is  and there are twodifferent kinds of I've knows yet. There's a case where. It follows, it'scalled acquired Priscilla pick nausea.

[00:19:14] And that's this following braindamage, right? So you might have had completely normal face recognition. Um,but in some rare cases, um, and it's rare because the. Areas that are importantfor face recognition are kind of small. Um, and they're bilateral in the brain.So in order to lose face recognition, you know, that's digital just with astroke or something like this, you have to be pretty lucky or unlucky, um, to,to get the right areas to be, to be hit.

[00:19:46] But in, in, in some rare cases,this happens following brain damage of one, one sort of another, and peoplebecome unable to recognize faces. Sometimes they can't recognize. Most otherthings visually, but sometimes it's, it's more specific to faces, so that'sacquired, preserve, pick nausea, but there, um, there's also something that'scalled developmental  and those arepeople this runs in families.

[00:20:13] And this is those people, peoplewho are boring, uh, pretty bad at, at face recognition and they just never,they never get better at it. Um, they develop in a kind of other ways to, totrack, you know, the people in there environment, they pay attention to theirhair and their voice and their clothes and their gait, uh, because they havelearned that they just, you know, they can't rely on their face recognitionskills.

[00:20:38] They can see faces, they're notblind to faces, you know, they can point to the parts of the face and they can,in some cases, um, I, I studied a patient with acquired . He was about 21. Andit was interesting because he told us that his mother was very upset with himafter they were taking a walk. And you mentioned that he thought this girlpassing them was pretty.

[00:21:03] And she said, okay, you don'teven recognize me. You know, can't recognize it. How can you comment onsomebody being pretty or not? And it was kind of happy to be able to talk withus about something like this, because we understood that. That's a verydifferent skill to be able to judge somebody as attractiveness versus recognizethem as an individual, but so they can see faces.

[00:21:24] They can make some judgementsabout faces, but they're not good at all at identifying them. But why does thathappen? Can it tell us anything about how people without this condition recognizefaces? Yeah. So as I said, this, this runs in families. So it's, it's beenhelpful. I mean, it's, it's rare, but once you find one, you're likely to beable to find others.

[00:21:46] If they have, you know, siblingsand uncles and people who want to, to be STO agreed to be steadied. And sothere have been studies, uh, of, um, You know, whether their brains aredifferent than, and you know, it's interesting, the connectivity betweendifferent parts of the brain is impacted. It seems to be like there are, um,you know, so the brain has a lot of, of, of, um, connect connections from onearea to another and face recognition.

[00:22:12] I mean, I spoke of one areathat's most important and that's often the one that's hit in acquired . But thereality is that. Like any skill, like anything that we do, you know, it w thebrain always, um, uses many different parts in order to do this, this task.Right. Um, and so there's no one. Part of the brain, that's just important forone function.

[00:22:40] So it appears in, indevelopmental Priscilla pic, Nozick's that the connectivities between, um,different parts of the brain are kind of less effective, less efficient, lesswell-developed, you know, there's, there's different kinds. So I don't want tomake one. Yeah, big description of what's going on, but it seems to rely onthis perhaps on the fact that they are the parts of the brain and the back ofthe brain that are important for perception are not getting the feedback thatthey need during kind of during learning during this period in life where facerecognition.

[00:23:15] Improves quite a bit. So there'sappears to be learning while this is likely to require a lot of connections tobe working very efficiently and they seem to have, um, poor connections betweenthese areas. We've already learned that the parts of the brain responsible forrecognizing faces can also pull a lot of other weight in cases of expertise.

[00:23:37] So do people with  have trouble recognizing different cars, forexample, It's always of interest in those studies of patients withpreserved  is whether their deficit isvery specific. So there's a whole. Yeah. First of all, these patients are rare.So you won't find a whole lot of studies. That includes many of them.

[00:24:01] And when I say patients, I guessI'm talking more about acquired precipitate nausea, that, that those, theother, the developmental precipitate Nozick's or not. You know, they're notsick, they don't have it disorder. They're just at the, at the bottom of that,of that normal curve we were talking about. So that's one problem and studyingthem.

[00:24:18] There are lots of case studiesthat are really fun to read where you find a precipitate Nozick patient.There's one, this, this guy is classic case he's he's um, we call him the cowman. Um, but he was a French farmer. And he had acquired Priscilla agnosia andhe, he had cows, he owned them and he used to be able to recognize them.

[00:24:40] And then he reported afterbecoming crystal pick Nozick that he could no longer identify, recognizes hiscows. Uh, there's another one, which she flagged that, um, like, you know, theykind of all blur in my mind, but there are similar cases. The problem is thatin order to see that you have to have a case of.

[00:24:59] Expertise. Right. You have tohave a patient who had an ability to recognize something else in a fine grainmanner like faces so that they can notice that there's a hit, right? That,that, Oh, this other thing, this other skill I had. No, my birdwatching is alsoeffective if you don't do a whole lot of that in your life, and definitely dobecause to start with your face recognition and your ability to become anexpert visually were not very high.

[00:25:27] So that's not something that youdid, you may, you may never notice. Now we and others have done some studiestrying to train people with presenting nausea to get better with, uh, you know,not becoming experts in an non-face, um, category. And. When they get better,they do it with very idiosyncratic skills.

[00:25:49] Like they do what they do withfaces, which is they find other clues that normal people might not use. It's alot of fine information in order to learn what you're trying to teach them, butthey don't seem to have access to the same kind of perceptual skills that weuse for faces. So, you know, yeah.

[00:26:06] They're there. There's there's adisagreement on this, how specific the disorder is, but you often find evidencethat their non face recognition skills are not normal. It's time for the bigquestion. Can we improve our recognition skills? The way we can improve ourskills at recognizing birds and cars?

[00:26:27] There's a sense in which theanswer is, it doesn't seem like you can do a whole lot to improve your general.Visual skills, your general perception skills. But if you're interested ingetting better in a specific domain, right. People do this all the time, right.People. Become birdwatchers late in life. And they become much better atrecognizing birds than they would have early in life, or they learn to, I don'tknow, they want to learn to Nash fingerprints.

[00:26:58] So they learned as difficultskills. Right. We learn new visual skills all the time and we, we do it. We doit by practice and learning. What are the important features? So we can dothis. This is not going to generalize over the domain that you're studying.Right. So if you become interested in planes or trains, uh, you're going tolearn something that's just going to apply to this domain.

[00:27:23] So. Which faces the challenge isthat we already have a whole lot of experience. This is the domain where you'vebeen doing this forever. You've you've had an apportioning to see faces all ofyour life, uh, in person on TV and magazines. And. If you haven't gone good atit, by the time you're an adult, it's unlikely that experience or a specialkind of training is going to really make you better at it.

[00:27:54] Now, if your goal is to becomebetter at recognizing people, well, as I said, That's actually a skill thatrelies on other things and perception, you know, it's relies on, on, on thingslike learning to associate a, a label, a name that's arbitrary, uh, with aface. And to the extent that you're good enough to recognize this face.

[00:28:17] And you know, this is someone you'veknown before. If what you're trying to do is, you know, be able to remembermore things about them, then the same sort of tips that are going to be usefulto improve your memory of. Um, uh, a fax is going to help with that. Andthat's, that's useful, I think, in, in social situations.

[00:28:38] So I guess the lesson is thatsomething like recognizing a person, it relies on different functions in thebrain and some of them are perceptual. Right. But if you're good enough, ifyou're average, you might not be the best that you know. So I, I'm not, my facerecognition skills are pretty average when I watch movies or TV shows, I'malways like I was this an actor that I saw on the subway, but I can.

[00:29:05] And I make a mistake when Icheck I'm usually wrong. Like I just sort of thought they looked similar andmaybe, you know, with a little age date, but no, they're not the same person.Um, and some of my friends are really, really good at this. Right. I don't knowthat. Um, I mean, as of now, there's, there's nothing that we know that wouldmake me better at this.

[00:29:28] Let's get back to this normallydistributed curve. Most of us are going to be average at recognizing people.We've all had a lot of practice attempting it by the time we're adults. So insome ways, if you aren't good at distinguishing the differences in people'sfacial features by adulthood, you may never be good at it.

[00:29:46] But like we talked about in theepisode about visual memory, it's important to actually pay attention and activelytake in the details you want to remember. That can make a difference. One ofthe big, biggest influence on, on that is the quality of encoding. Now, whatdid you do when you first learned it?

[00:30:05] Were you paying attention? Didyou think about some cues that could help you remember it? In the future. Andif you do that work, when you encode the name and maybe you do what, you know,a lot of people recommend, which is use it a few times in the first interactionso that you get a chance to get the practice.

[00:30:23] And, um, you'll get better atthis, you know, pretty easily. I mean, unless you have a specific memorydeficit name recognition, this is something that you can, that you can getbetter at. What have we learned so far? Like we learned in previous episodes, alot of networks and connections in the brain are responsible for your abilityto distinguish human faces.

[00:30:48] Something called the fusiformface area plays a large role in that these same brain regions are also at playwhen you're distinguishing other things from each other in cases of expertise.Like when you're identifying the difference between cars or birds or cowspeople's ability to recognize faces naturally improves until around age 30,your ultimate skill at this depends largely on your genetics, as well as a lotof environmental factors.

[00:31:15] Like whether you grew up in alarge town, At the end of the day, most people's skills are going to fall inthe middle of the curve. There are people that live on either end of the skillcurve, though, super recognizers and people with what some call face blindness.The term Super-Recognizers doesn't really have a precise definition ordifference in the brain.

[00:31:34] It essentially refers to someonewho is above average in their ability to recognize people face blindness. Onthe other hand is actually called prosopagnosia. These people can be bornwithout the ability to distinguish one face from another, or they can lose thatability through some kind of brain damage.

[00:31:52] Recognizing people is a separateskill from remembering someone's name names are pretty arbitrary. They can't bevisualized, which makes them hard to remember. But connecting names to faces isabsolutely crucial for making friends and business connections. So I turnedback to our friend, Harry Lorraine, memory improvement, expert and author ofbooks, like the memory book.

[00:32:14] Yeah. How he memorizes names.And he's definitely the pro to ask remember, episode one. When we heard himremember over 100 names on the Johnny Carson show. Why don't we do it this waywith a few people who gave me the names at any time today, would you just riseit, your seat so I can see, Oh my Lord. Okay.

[00:32:34] Ms. Kellman, uh, Ms. Lank, Ms.Schwartz, Mr. Dodge, uh, Mr. Billings, Mr. Mrs. Kilgore that those are theMillers. Mr. Milton of business built a Wayne. Yeah. 10 seats. The example I'veused so many times I met a Mr. Bent the Vega years ago. No, that's an Italianname, obviously, and it perhaps has meaning in Italian so that you canvisualize it.

[00:33:01] But if you don't know theItalian language, that it's a conglomeration of sound as most languages are.Uh, when I say language, I mean, I suppose name saw it's a conglomeration ofSouth bend. Devania has no meaning, not. As I mentioned before, one of the keysto a trained memory is visualization. You have to be able to visualize what youwant to remember now, how in the world can I visualize

[00:33:31] Remember the last episode, whenwe talked about breaking words down into components, you can visualize it'stime to bring that back. And the example I'm using here, Ben Devania made methink of the bent weathervane bent vein, which enough to remind me that. Let metalk about the word rewind for a moment.

[00:33:51] The peat to memory and I callthis is the reminder principle. One thing reminds you of the other. Let merepeat that as the key to memory training. Okay. Bent weathervane reminds me ofbent the Vega. And the important thing here is that I can visualize a bent,whether they're, you know what I'm talking about, each I pain that's got any Wson it.

[00:34:18] Harry pointed out that a lot ofpositive side effects come out of using this technique by trying to come upwith an association for the person's name, you listen, you pay attention andyou concentrate. That's already putting you steps ahead and it could evenbecome fun. Okay. That's the first step you heard the name that Devania youmade it meaningful in your mind's eye by visualizing or thinking of as a isvisualizing.

[00:34:45] Are the best weather days out atstep one, there are three steps to the concept that I've written about forthree years. And the next step is to tie up the best weather vane. The thingthat came up with aura, so cheated too. The persons who face now, you're alsoconcentrating, trying to apply them outside the feature.

[00:35:08] So let's just show that, justselect the person's nose, which I did, because I'm giving you an example.That's legitimate. I met her. That's a thing yet. Lord knows how many decadesago. And I've been using him as an example, all these decades anyway, tofeature I fall down and let's just show them it's the one.

[00:35:28] That you find when you meet thisway, if you hadn't met Mr. Pennsylvania was he had a big nose. That's what Iselected the big nose after looking at the entire face. Uh, now he comes tothird and most important of the three items I've got new associate. The bentvein, which is what I came up to reminds me of that there's that remind theprinciple to remind me of the name to the persons outside the feature, which isthe lows all I did and while you'd have to do, and all I've tried to teachabout this idea is as I looked at the face and as I'm shaking ans.

[00:36:08] Because it's that quick as I'mshaking hands with mr. Pennsylvania, I visualized a bent weathervane instead ofa nose. That's what I saw. And the next time I saw mr. Pennsylvania, that toldme his name. That's the key. All right. So as Harry described, there are three mainsteps. First listened to the name and take note of the person's face second,come up with an association for the name.

[00:36:36] Third tie that association tothe person's face in the process. You'll be listening and paying attention moreclosely than before. So you're starting better off than you were the exercisefrom episode seven draws on the same skills. It's about breaking a name down orfinding creative wordplay that helps you remember it.

[00:36:56] For example, my last name isAllard. Maybe you could associate that with Mallard and imagine I have a duckbill instead of a mouse. Revisit episode seven, if you want a refresher courseon how you can break down and visualize words and join us next week for anexciting look at the fallibility of memory with one of the field's foremostexperts,

[00:37:21] what heard was memory booster,uh, Himalaya learning audio course, be sure to check out all of the otherexclusive courses in the Himalaya app or on himalaya.com.